Funny, frank 'In the Next Room, or the vibrator play' performed brilliantly at Cleveland Play House

Roger MastroianniCatherine Givings (Nisi Sturgis) with her husband's lone male patient, Leo Irving (Zac Hoogendyk, nailing the self-indulgent histrionics of painters everywhere), as Dr. Givings "treats" a patient in the next room in the Cleveland Play House production of "In the Next Room, or the vibrator play." The doctor invents a special "Chattanooga vibrator" for Leo, an actual device used by Victorian physicians that resembled a whirling corn cob on a stick.

Review

In the Next Room, or the vibrator play

What: The Cleveland Play House pres ents the Tony-nominated play by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Laura Kepley.

It's hard to adequately describe the cognitive dissonance of the scene, but here goes: Upon arriving at the venerable Cleveland Play House for Wednesday's opening-night performance of "In the Next Room, or the vibrator play," patrons were offered a darling little silver vibrator as a party favor. Batteries included. And some cranks think live theater is dull.

The sex toy was the perfect, cheeky prologue to Sarah Ruhl's funny, sexy, moving work brought to lip-biting, toe-curling life by a superb ensemble cast. By the curtain call, you might feel as deliciously spent as the actors onstage. You might even reach for a cigarette.

But the piece is as layered as the sumptuous 19th-century costumes by designer David Kay Mickelsen, not easily dismissed as a naughty comic romp. Its themes go much deeper, unpacking notions of science vs. nature, gender roles, sexual politics and the many vexing, complicated shades of love.

Set at the dawn of electricity, the piece draws on the real-life practice of treating women suffering from the murky diagnosis of "hysteria" with "electric massage." (At no point did the Victorian men of science think the preponderance of "congested" wombs might have anything to do with the joyless sex lives of their wives.)

A whirring machine about the size and shape of an old hair dryer produced the revitalizing remedy. Such treatments weren't viewed as sexual but as dry, strictly by-the-book medical therapies, an attitude perfectly summed up by the set, the well-appointed home of one Dr. Givings (Jeremiah Wiggins, playing scientific indifference to perfection).

Arranged in a "T" shape, with the living room in front and the doctor's operating theater in the back, the effect is that of a split-screen movie. We watch as Dr. Givings, almost bored, brings women to climax "in the next room" while his wife, Catherine (a miraculously mercurial Nisi Sturgis), serves tea to guests in the front of the house.

Catherine is a young mother fretting about not being able to produce enough milk for her newborn and dumb to her own desires. She is stumped when asked if she is the sort of person who always carries an umbrella or doesn't mind getting wet.

When Sabrina Daldry (Birgit Huppuch, hysterical as a hysteric) first visits Doctor Feelgood, she is swathed in a black veil, her sorrow dripping from her like Spanish moss. She weeps uncontrollably and is sensitive to cold and light, especially from the newfangled electric lamp -- the unnatural illumination, she fears, will make everyone's faces look like those of monsters.

Both women are in need of liberation, and not just from their tight corsets and suffocating Victorian conventions. Catherine loves her husband, but her marriage is starved of true intimacy. And Sabrina? Though her malady is plainly Mr. Daldry (Donald Carrier, playing a fabulously insensitive buffoon in muttonchops), she is dubbed a perfect candidate for the electromechanical cure.

Sabrina strips to her skivvies (an absurdly laborious process) with the help of the doctor's severe assistant, Annie (Gail Rastorfer, brilliantly blank and exuding all the bedside manner of a beached sturgeon), and crawls under a sheet.

As the doctor presses the device to her privates and consults his watch, Sabrina has what we are to assume is her first "paroxysm," one of many to come. 'She is transformed, color returning to her pallid cheeks. "Oh, God in his heaven!" she cries.

The simulated orgasms are not porny, corny or "faked" (in the classic table-pounding, hair-flipping style of Meg Ryan in "When Harry Met Sally . . . "), which is no small achievement. "Now remember," Ruhl noted in the script, "that these are the days before digital pornography. There is no cliche of how women are supposed to orgasm, no idea in their heads of how they are supposed to sound when they climax."

Under the direction of Laura Kepley, the actresses avoid camp versions of ecstasy in favor of what Ruhl calls an "embarrassingly natural" release. The effect is often comic, sometimes uncomfortably raw, but always real, the centerpiece of one of the most frank and unashamed explorations of female sexuality ever put onstage -- or in any medium, really. It's an astonishing achievement in an age when moms take strip aerobics and pole-dancing classes for exercise.

Just when you think the entire culture has been pornified, it's a play set in the late 1880s that puts the submerged universe of female desire squarely before your eyes. Now that's worth pounding a table about.

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